Trees

In the bedroom with six windows on the south wall, three on the west wall, and three big skylights on the south facing slope of the roof, rain takes over. The soft sound fills the room, the warmest and lightest in the house. The rain sheets on the skylights, distorting the view of the treetops. The view to the south and west is wet trees and mist.  With the leaves gone the lichen on the dark, wet tree bark plays a bigger role in the scene. Sunday.  No work calls to me, and we have no commitments until dinner downtown.  Hazel is napping in her cat cave.  Charlie is licking off his wet paws on the bed.  Jay is getting ready to start the split pea soup in the kitchen. This is our peaceable kingdom, heaven on earth.

The woods are so present here, filling the view, defining the space.  When Charlie and I walk along Averill Road, and even more so when I walk out the trail to Moe pond, the forest pulls me in. Now, late in the fall, with the leaves nearly all gone, the forest is roomy and inviting.  There is something about the human sized spaces between the trees receding away up the hill or dropping with the slope that calls to me like a siren.  Walk here.  There’s plenty of room for you.  There’s a clear, if winding, path.  There are secrets to discover.  There are places to hide.  The woods fill me with memories of girlhood in Amenia.

One of Mom’s few rules was that we weren’t allowed to hike in the woods alone out of sight of the house. It was a sensible rule for children who might sprain an ankle or get confused about which direction to take for home. So we were always at least a duo, and more often a little gang, on our hikes until we were well into our later teens when we did venture alone.  We did get a bit lost from time to time, but never lost enough to be scared, only lost enough to argue about which way to go, only lost enough to be a little excited, our senses a little sharpened, only lost enough to come upon a well known landmark where we weren’t expecting it.

So many children grow up now without ever experiencing being lost, unless they lose their way in a mall or a vast parking garage. Everyone should get to experience being lost in the woods, out of sight, out of shouting range. The woods never seemed hostile or frightening, despite the fairy tales we had been raised on.  And of course, we were never in any real danger, never so far from a road that we couldn’t get back to somewhere known before night fell in the long summer afternoons. But being a little lost gave us a taste of the real relationship between small humans and big trees, big spaces.  It gave us a taste of time in a different way, time measured in light, time measured in the age of trees, in the age of the stream that cut through rock.

I love the proportions of Village life, the physical space, the social and political space, the scale of time.  The place where this village sits has been home to humans for such a long time, so long before the European invaders came.  In a place where a great deal of what you see hasn’t been altered by humans, it’s easier to be mindful of how damaging our presence can be. Life in cities has produced great wonders – for better and for worse. But life in villages has produced great calm and peace, harder to find where there are fewer trees. 

The trees and the slope of the road make it hard to see cars coming up Main Street from Averill.  The intersection makes me nervous.  We have a stop sign heading downhill on Averill, but there’s no stop for the village bound cars coming uphill on Main, and having stopped, we can’t see far enough down Main to know if it’s safe to proceed.  So at a “Breakfast With The Board” shortly after we moved here I asked the vice mayor what I could do to get a stop sign on Main. “Send me an email,”  she replied, and I did.  The Roads and Streets committee took up my request, approved it, and sent it on to the Board of Trustees who accepted their recommendation and approved my stop sign.  I’ll be glad to have it in place before icy roads make that intersection even riskier.  But mostly, I’m glad to live in a place where I know everyone on the Board of Trustees, where I run into them in the farmers’ market or at Stagecoach Coffee or in the gym.  We live together differently here.  The webs of relationships and histories and interests are denser here. For the most part, we focus on what we have in common and not on the opinions that divide us.  We focus on being neighbors.  The trees model that neighborliness, making woods out of their differences.  The trees help us hold that focus on what binds us in community.